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Inspired by the tepid creature at the heart of JJ Abrams Super 8 - read my unsatisfied opinion upon it here - Vulture wrote up a wonderful piece on the state of movie monsters that you oughta read. Choice bit:
"Verisimilitude is a terrible guiding factor for crafting a movie alien.
Throw out the playbook, filmmakers! If you're going to withhold your alien for the majority of the film, make sure that when we finally see it, it comes as an actual surprise. At this point, giant space bugs are the furthest thing from alien, since we've seen them in so many other films and they're essentially grasshoppers on steroids. Why not think totally outside the box and give us character designs that are practically beyond our comprehension?"
It's partially why I think we need to keep clanging the bells for some HP Lovecraft film adaptations to come about - the entire point of his work is to summon up the uncanny. Oh to have gotten to see Guillermo Del Toro take on the shoggoths!
Anyway this reminds me of my list of favorite recent movie monsters that I wrote up a couple of years ago. All so simple yet unsettling still! When I was watching The Rite last night I had a similar thought process - there's this series of photographs shown in the film of people possessed by demons and they all looked like something you'd see if a class of first-year photography students were told to ape Diane Arbus. Black and white and arty all over!
Ugh. It reminded me of why I prefer Ringu's video imagery ten times over the American remake's - the remake's is too clean, too purposefully art-directed. Too sterile. There's so much more horror to be reamed from banality, from it popping up in an unexpected place where you're not quite prepared for it.
I actually have an example of this to share from just this morning - I was jogging down the street and noticed a man walking towards me on the opposite side of the street. There wasn't anything noticeable about him at first, it was just early and we were the only two people on the street is why I noticed him. So I didn't pay him much mind until I was passing him and he caught my eye again as we crossed - I think it was just the fact that I was half-awake but he did have some kind of limp and somehow out of the corner of my eye this translated into the herky-jerky movement of someone who's been shot on film moving backwards and then the film's run forwards to give it that unreal quality (does that have a name?), and so I turned to look at him to make sure I was just being seeing things and he had this giant crazy person grin on his face. Now that is unsettling. That you remember. It's the things that don't fit in no matter how hard you try, they were never meant to fit in, they were never meant period, that'll getcha.
Anyway this reminds me of my list of favorite recent movie monsters that I wrote up a couple of years ago. All so simple yet unsettling still! When I was watching The Rite last night I had a similar thought process - there's this series of photographs shown in the film of people possessed by demons and they all looked like something you'd see if a class of first-year photography students were told to ape Diane Arbus. Black and white and arty all over!
Ugh. It reminded me of why I prefer Ringu's video imagery ten times over the American remake's - the remake's is too clean, too purposefully art-directed. Too sterile. There's so much more horror to be reamed from banality, from it popping up in an unexpected place where you're not quite prepared for it.
I actually have an example of this to share from just this morning - I was jogging down the street and noticed a man walking towards me on the opposite side of the street. There wasn't anything noticeable about him at first, it was just early and we were the only two people on the street is why I noticed him. So I didn't pay him much mind until I was passing him and he caught my eye again as we crossed - I think it was just the fact that I was half-awake but he did have some kind of limp and somehow out of the corner of my eye this translated into the herky-jerky movement of someone who's been shot on film moving backwards and then the film's run forwards to give it that unreal quality (does that have a name?), and so I turned to look at him to make sure I was just being seeing things and he had this giant crazy person grin on his face. Now that is unsettling. That you remember. It's the things that don't fit in no matter how hard you try, they were never meant to fit in, they were never meant period, that'll getcha.
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